Welcome to Oscailt 3: A new generation of Indymedia Software

Indymedia Ireland Launches Oscailt 3.0 Platform As well as Indymedia Ireland's constant efforts to produce and distribute information in an open and democratic manner, we put a similar effort into creating and disseminating free software to allow others to do the same. Today, after more than 18 months of development, we finally launch version 3.0 of our Oscailt content management system.

New Features

Oscailt 3.0 has literally hundreds of new features which will progressively appear on the Irish site over the next few months. Some of the most important ones for users are the following:

Images Made Easy - Oscailt now automatically resizes all images for web-viewing - this means that you can now upload much bigger images than before.

Lots of anti-spam / anti-troll measures Users can report any post on the site by clicking on the report post icon beside it. The ../editorial dalek has also been given some major new powers - it's hungrier than ever to exterminate those annoying trolls.

Context Sensitive headlines - every article is now accompanied by a list of headlines from the same author and with the same category - making it much easier to follow threads through our coverage of issues.

Lots of new ways to get involved - Oscailt 3 allows lots of different ways for people to get involved in indymedia Ireland - from reporting posts to managing a whole section of the site, there are more ways than ever to get involved in indymedia and help us to carry the voices of the excluded around the world!

New Multi-lingual Features Oscailt 3 allows us to manage the translation of the site into several languages easily - we will be starting to translate as much of the site as we can into Irish in the near future

A new look to the site - take a look around our newly designed site and let us know what you think!

Some Background

Oscailt has thusfar been almost entirely produced by the technical group of indymedia Ireland. It's history is very much bound up with the history of indymedia Ireland, although it is now starting to grow both within the IMC Network and elsewhere.

For us, the fact that we produce our own software and distribute it for free is a very important part of Indymedia - the idea of Open Publishing owes much to the free software movement. With the development of Oscailt 3.0, the software has started to spread even further into non-indymedia sites. Although version 3.0 has not yet been fully publically released, there are already a list of sites who are using one of the beta releases to power their site. For example: Anarkismo, International Anarchist News Site and Sonidos Libertarios. Oscailt 3.0 beta versions also power the newest member of the indymedia family: Virginia Beach Indymedia as well as prospective ones like East Africa IMC

More Information

Oscailt is Licensed under the GPL. It can be downloaded from the Oscailt Sourceforge Page. The documentation for Oscailt 3 is available on the indymedia documentation wiki. The current release is numbered 3.0-rc1 - meaning that it is a 'release candidate' - we expect the full public release to take place within a few weeks.

RSS and atom feeds allow you to keep track of new comments on particular stories. You can input the URL's from these links into a rss reader and you will be informed whenever somebody posts a new comment. hide help

Trouble is that now all the old links to articles and comments seem to be broken. Could you setup a script to redirect (302) requests for the old newswire.php?id=123 type articles to their new locations please.

Excellent additions to what is already without question a brilliant and continously improving site. Fair play to everyone involved. Really glad about the improvements to uploading photos as I've never been able to figure out how to resize before uploading.

Our iTunes Podcasting Link has just gone live - check it out in the left column. Follow Indymedia Ireland Web Radio!

All linked audio content is included, so to have your audio offering included in our podcast, just put a link to it into a comment. Although Indymedia Ireland does not have the space to allow audio or video uploads, you can use http://video.indymedia.org or http://radio.indymedia.org and link to the files from here.

I don't think the search feature is working (magnifying glass icon - upper r-h side of page) - I clicked on it, and expected a search dialog to open where I could enter search criteria, but it didn't - i just got a message that no articles with my search details were founmd. I tested it on IE and Firefox... same result

I've been wandering around the site and really like the improvements, the colour scheme reminds me of the National Concert Hall of my youth, a sort of snobby Irish green. ;-) and the panic I felt when the old links didn't appear to work has now subsided. I've tried coming into imc ireland from a load of other sites (and it is impressive how many referring links there are over 4 years). I hope readers and contributors will look back there in the archives, now they are a bit more user friendly to access. This site is a "national archive" of news, opinions, protests, actions, campaigns at the most basic level of democratic involvement. Its wonderful to look back at the extent of solidarity not just on obvious international issues such as the war on Iraq, or European development, Precarity or Migrants, but also on local "little people" issues. A web of links from Norway and beyond for the Rossport 5, as too a web of links from the European campaigns fighting pylons in Italy, France, Spain to Donegal and Roscommon.

We have created through unprecedented voluntary co-operation (often between individuals who have never met in the real world) an archive which is unrivalled for accesibility not only at local national level (Ireland) but globally. And no-one can underestimate the Irish contribution. This site not only "looks & feels well" it is one of the most visited (and used) of such sites on the global network.
Our "horizontal media punch" is much heavier than our "geographical weight", perhaps due to our nature which is "non-anglo-saxon/yankee"
we have become a portal between worlds. The world of english as spoken throughout the Irish diasporia and the worlds of our European fellow citizens and the 3rd world. That is an extent of readership and contribution and influence which commercial media such as the O'Reilly empire or the Irish Times or even state entities such as RTE may dream of.
Not one word which passed our guidelines and got published has disappeared. Someday this resource will be used by historians and sociologists alike when the question "how did those indymedia people change the world?" comes to be answered.

Is anyone else having trouble with the new Indymedia format. I can't read some text it seems to be too light and is obscured by the dark green background colour . Also in the latest comments section I can't see the titles of the threads that people are commenting on. In different sections it is difficult to read what is on the site. The old colour scheme was better, this new one is not working.

I love Indymedia, it's powerful. Thanks to all who work behind the scenes maintaining and improving it.

In general I prefer the brightness, simplicity and clarity of the old look of the site. My first reaction to the new look is that it is fussy and less attractive to the eye.

Although the green shades of the left and right columns are nice in themselves and have a contemporary feel, they don't work for me cos they're too light and opaque. The dark green text on light green of the right column is less clear than the old and less attractive to the eye. The white text on light green of the left column I actually find a strain to read. Maybe it's cos I wear reading glasses, as do many, but I find myself reacting away from the left column, which isn't good. You've also lost the nice colour definition between dates and text of left column events. Maybe the new dark green text colour could be used with black over the old light grey background of both columns to maintain the brightness and attractiveness, which is vital, and still be more contemporary than the old bright green text (which is still good, in my opinion). Reds should be as dark as possible I think.

You have changed the 'Indymedia Ireland' header already and that's good, yesterday's one was cramped and dark and lacked 'white'. I like the bold black font of the new one beside the spacious white on the right. I think the 6 ' features, newswire etc ' tabs should stay stretched across the top for prominence and the 'search' bar put back where it was where it's more noticable. I think the 'search' bar is too far right, obscure and a bit lost where it is.

The new Grey headlines on the features page are a backward step, in my opinion. They're just not as strong as black which has got to be the clearest. Headlines should look like headlines and black is your man. The headline font size has been decreased also and should be restored to original size ... in black, for full effect. New look has sense of features blurring into one aspect creating less definition and less attraction to the eye of the reader. I don’t like line between articles which are fussy and unnecessary for definition. 'Full story and comments’ should be underlined (on left like old for space) and all that’s needed to distinguish between articles, provides subtle break, needs a bit of space too before next one.

I don't like the break up of the right column into different 'types of story'. When yesterday's newspapers are old news, what's nice about Indymedia is the comfort of stuff in the right column being news for a while and you don't feel rushed into keeping yourself informed. Stuff will dissappear of front page quicker now with the new way and that makes me nervous! Therefore 'Breaking news’ is unnecessary and slightly frantic and 'Sky newsish', 'Newswire' is reassuring! Suggest complete return to old way, with restored nice attractive red underlined 'Publish your news'. I don't think it's necessary to distinguish between types when its the content that matters.

Perhaps 'Other Press' could be moved to right column to give more prominence and 'press releases' be moved to under 'events'.

On the subject of 'Events', forgive me please but the new ' Events' page is brutal. The old way was so clear attractive and user friendly. It certainly wasn't broken and fixing it has fucked it, in my opinion.

The new light grey links and URL's should be changed to the new dark green ... it's highlighting they need not lowlighting.

I like it when you go to someones article there are 'recent articles by...' . Suggest there should be general link there also to 'other articles by ' or 'all articles by'.

In general, I think the 'less is more' and 'keep it simple stupid' rules should apply to Indymedia appearance. Appearance is all, and simplicity, clarity and brightness are what you need to instantly draw the eye of a reader, just like opening the curtains on a cold crisp sunny day. Radical changes of appearance are dangerous, discreet changes are better, IF improvements are needed. The novelty of change will wear off but negative effects on readership and disimprovements in userfriendliness won't. So we've got to be very careful we don't turn the beacon of newspapers into another fussy website.

ONE THING: please give the IMC NETWORK/GLOBAL element more space. It was better when all the countries were listed. God knows the mainstream media is parochial enough in this country, let's not go down that road...

Images Images are now resized by default to 30K when you view them with an article (the difference is fairly minor at screen resolution) but if you click on the image, you get taken to a full-sized version. See http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74005 for an example.

One of my main criticisms of indymedia, is that news, opinion, press releases, action call-outs are all lumped together without any attempt to seperate them.

It's really good that you've split things into different sections - BUT - the first thing I clicked on once I'd scanned the front page was the 'newswire' link - and there's everything lumped together again. Had I not been checking out the new look, I might well have stopped looking there until I realised there were filtering options - which allow for selecting just 'news' or just 'opinion'. Since it's called 'newswire' why not simply default to news filtering on that page? Which would almost entirely filter out the indymediaisms and fit better with the look and layout of the front page.

Greetings from Nairobi (Kenya) via Canada and Barbados.
As is the nature of the web, I stumbled across an insightful article (see: http://cvilleindymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=918 ) on your network, and noticed the "powered by Oscalit" logo at the bottom. Being curious about technology, I decided to take a peek.
Wow!!! Awesome CMS (content management system) and I hope to take it for a spin some day.

Most importantly, I looooove the spirit of your community - based on the articles on all of your affiliate sites. Maybe I'll start one here in East Africa. :-)

Take care and good luck.
I'll be sure to mention this on my Tech blog when I write on open source CMSs.

The phrase was always 'play the ball and not the man' - a common phrase in sport. Is that sexist? Is it offensive? Somebody complained about the gendering of this once a long time ago and when I was entering the text in this page configuration I changed it to woman.

Anyway, consider it changed. But still let me know how it is sexist or offensive.

its the perception that counts. as i stated here and on the seomra spraoi thread i didnt think there was any sexist intent. and i didnt think it was sexist.

but there are emails flying around and are now starting to turn up on lists. apparently someone complained about the wording and got an insulting response from an editor. this is what has been reported, i dont know who the response came from.

1. The text on the 'latest comments' page should be darker to provide contrast with the background and make it easier to read.

2. There used to be a little box to tick near the 'search' box. This allowed us to 'include comments' when we were doing a search.

3. Regarding "play the woman". I presume that was intended as some kind of reverse sexism or positive discrimination. Some people will always interpret things in a negative way, and will always find something to be offended about.

4. I don't like that particular shade of green. The old shade was sharper.

QUOTE: but there are emails flying around and are now starting to turn up on lists. apparently someone complained about the wording and got an insulting response from an editor. this is what has been reported, i dont know who the response came from.

Thanks for passing on that accusation PatC. As far as I am aware there has been NO response from an editor that was insulting. There was a response from a NON-editor who was also subscribed to the open editorial list to which anyone can subscribe. I think this has since been dealt with. All lists that are genuine responses from IMC Ireland Editorial are:
1) crossposted to the respondent and the editorial list (check the list to see if the response has also gone out to all the other editors. If it hasn't then it has no validity. Even if it has then it may be followed by a response from other editors.)
2) signed as "1 of IMC Ireland Editorial" or "1 of IMC Ireland Volunteers"
3) not contested by other members of the editorial committee.

In short, just because you post to the list and get a response from someone you're not guaranteed that person is an editor. The only genuine response is an open one that all the other editors can see (and if necessary contest).

I agree with the thrust of Niall Hartnetts comments. However the main problem that I have with the new format is that the text is way too small in general. I have good eyesight and I can just about read the news articles. The text on this page (add comments) above the white boxes is completely illegible. Is there some setting button that I haven't seen? I have tried changing screen size from 1024*768 to 800*600, made no difference. I never had this problem before and if it's the same for everyone then you'll be losing a lot of readers with pooreer eyesight who won't be interested in squinting at the screen ('tis bad enough to be looking at them normally!) to read Irelands best news site.
P.S. Can't read the terms and conditions for publishing either but I'm sure I'll agree with them.

In my ecstatic haze at the thoughts that such a slap in the face to patenting, existed up there right next to harvard and other such promoters of ignorance, I lost my ability to count. Cyber law is actually fifth. Still in the golden rectangle, where one doesn't need to scroll. Microsoft and other similar shitheads don't even get a look in.

the search term without the commas, yielded a result of 13,700,000 hits. It was outta da rectangle a bit. But was still on the page. Hit no. 7

fair play to all involved in the site but i must make some basic observations, the colour is terrible, i thought it was just temporary, from a basic colour-psychological point of view, anyone who logged on to the old site will be much more likely to stay browsing because it is bright.. the current colour is closer to a grey, and really uninviting..... please please change back to the old, ahem... when its not broken dont fix it, damn i hate complaining.. sorry but needs to be said: the old site was much much better

As a web developer myself I reckon the new colours are great, very crisp and professional looking. The old site always looked a bit clunky and the colours were too jarring. As far as the text goes I can't see any problems. The colour of text is never a problem for legibility, its the contrast between forground and background, and on that score I think the site gets ten out of ten.

To most people the old site probably looked like any typical cheapass activist site, but the new layout looks like a real proper news site, much less likely to turn mainstream people off who generally have mindset that only trusts brandnames and "official" looking things.

And I don't understand people who say they can't find this or they can't find that, just look around, its just a matter of familiarity, and would be the same on any site, probably the old one too when you first used it.

I only dicovered this, because the front page has been too big for my screen since Oscailt3 was launched, and I've had to use scroll-bar or arrows to find newswire. Page sizes for articles are eratic, but this one is perfect this time.

The problem may be with XP (surprise, surpise!), but I never had such problems on Oscailt2.

When I scroll over, the margin/gutter on the right seems unnecessarilly large (much larger than before).

IThe debate over the new newswire seems to have been resolved for now, but I find the comments layout mildly annoying.

The grouping of comments into numbered links makes it less easy to search for words or phrases used, especially in articles with dozens of comments. Ctl+F does the job nicely on Windows if the comments aren't divied or segmented.

revolt video had its first meeting in seomra spraoi last wednesday, very good, lots of interesting projects in the pipeline
anyway next wed we are having a workshop and tutorial evening, we emailed and asked some of imc-ie could they come along to take us through the new oscailt features- we hope someone will be able to attend.
eitherway we will be giving workshops on photo, audio, video, computer use. we should have some free software to distribute

Context Sensitive headlines - every article is now accompanied by a list of headlines from the same author and with the same category - making it much easier to follow threads through our coverage of issues. - maybe a link to how to do this would help

will some editor have to add the little audio image on past audio threads so as when you click on audio you get all past stuff,

personally prefer the old gif which has been reinstated, conasoid impra.......

def agree all links to full imc network should be put back along left edge

a link, to get up to date reports of hits etc, and a visual to show this, ie a graph of months to hits etc, and

Overall i like the new look, some things took a bit of getting used to, but now i know my way around.

One thing though I don't like is the the exclamation mark icon to right of every comment to report abuse. It's too ugly. Maybe it should be changed to nice pastel red colour like that used by the author and calendar icons below each comment title. And maybe it could be moved over there too so it doesn't jump out as much.

as someone who has worked with colours and their effects a lot (i also did my thesis on it, boring i know but hey) i must admit that the shade of green here is one that will suit very very few people, the older green is more likely to keep people returning to the site ( same reason why corporate websites are bright and often have music as you first enter), this shade of green is not one that will encourage first time users to indymedia to return to indymedia, its boring, uncaptivating and i would highly highly recommend changing it back to the older shade of green or developing a brighter shade, you would be astounded as to how important and effective colours are upon the mind. even if indymedia foolishly decide to keep this shade of green i would recommend placing the writing in a colour other than white, the white and the extremely light green are a disastorous mix for any website that is attempting to gain support, grow as a collective/ movement etc. Really, i cannot re-iterate the importance of colour and keeping this shade is a step backwards, everything else is fine but the colour is really inappropiate, perhaps better for a fluffy type peace site but not a non corporate politcal site, why do you think most other indymedia sites are black or deep colours? deep colours are much much more effective.As a bit of empiraical social research( peculiar life that i lead) i asked three friends of mine who had never looked at indymedia to go the site yesterday , i then showed them the old site as i had a page saved on my computer, all of them thought that the old colour was much better and they all said they would be more likely to return to the old site... all of them used the word boring to describe the colour, thus, i can only encourage the editorial to change the colour.

>thats why corporate websites are bright and often have music as you first enter

Maybe I'm the exception but I've never stayed on a website that has music, in fact i can't think of anything cheesier, and I think bright colours just look cheap and tacky. I mean have you ever gone to those socialist sites with all their hyperactive reds and blacks, they look like children made them.

>why do you think most other indymedia sites are black or deep colours?

Eh probably 'cos they were made by activists who love all that "in your face" hyperactivity. it works well for a poster thats trying to catch your attention, but I think for a website that you have to read everyday, you want something more akin to newspaper or magazine, easy on the eye like.

I really like what you’ve done with your front page. It hadn’t really occurred to me that the cover of the Irish Times could do with a makeover, but when I saw your new layout, well, it was just great… asdf asdf asdf…

I never got to pen such appreciation to Madam Editor when she changed the layout/format of the front page of the IT last year (or was it as far back as 2004?). One must be somewhat reserved in one’s praise, and since there was no constructive criticism I could offer, just lavish praise, I held back in the end.

So, by virtue of my publishing, you’ll have guessed that I have some constructive criticism to offer. I’ll start with an acknowledgement that the layout is aesthetically pleasing. I also like the separation into breaking news and opinion, although it was only this evening that I noticed it.

But I must have my whinge – the events page has not benefited from the whole Oscailt 3 thing. In particular, I preferred it when I could see the location of each event listed next to it (even if posters did often list their events as national or international, when there was a specific location in Ireland that could be identified with the event). I also preferred the layout whereby each event was effectively a separate row on a table that laid things out month by month. This new format of one table per week, where each day has a column just isn’t doing it for me. But it’s the location thing that’s really getting to me. Is it that Dublin-centric that we assume it’s a Dublin-based event, unless there’s another location named in the title? I don’t like it, boy.

I haven’t much insight into the launch version 3.0 of your Oscailt content management system, other than shareware is the ultimate weapon against the software monopolists, so big shout out to all who put their time into developing this.

And finally, in the spirit of comradely constructive criticism, I’ve just spotted a typo on the publish page: the Please Note paragraph has a double-s newss.

And really finally this time, have ye changed the rating with the web-censors? The 'net-nanny at work won't allow me to log onto Indymedia.ie anymore 'cos it's political!

When i first saw the new format i thought it was just an oversight, a bit of artwork that wasnt finished but would appear soon. On the top left of the page underneath features and newswire where i assume the title indymedia ireland is supposed to appear i still have a blank space. i only copped on when i read someone elses comment about what they can see, just thought i'd let you know but i guess its something wrong at my end

Email to IMC-Ireland Mailing List (Feb 10 2006)...
'the use of html in writing comments or articles by only a few members of the collective with editorial privelage runs counter to the principles of a democratic newswire and paves the way for elitist use. I propose that the use of html be prohibited in both articles and comments and only appear in feature articles in the central column.'http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/private/imc-ireland/....html

I think this email was directed at me from another thread discussion, so, here's the How-To's doing the small amount of HTML that Oscailt 3.0 allows us here....

Yes, a welcome addition - thank you for including this. If I can suggest you clarify in the help what em and strong do it might help (there may be uneducated non-structuralists out there still stuck with and .

Also, I am not clear on the use of small. Seems unncecessary. I think CITE might be a better choice.

Back to search - the icon on the top right hand definitely does nothing, whereas the menu option on the left does - I presume they should launch the same functionality...

(Jakob Neilsen changes his mind a lot by the way, but he does emphasise the need to allow for short cuts for advanced users and for the user to remain in control of font sizes, etc).

To Robbie: the spatial problems reported last week are still a mystery to me and I can't reproduce them anywhere - I'll keep looking though. The links coming out of the box are a consequence of a CSS bug in IE - there is a workaround but it's not implemented yet.

To Gaygeoir: the search box in the top right hand corner should definitely work. You have to replace the search indymedia text with your search string before you hit the icon.

The spatial odity I reported earlier, I have found in worse measure on Mozilla Firefox. In Firefox, only one half of the screen (left or right) is visible at one time. The problem may be with Windows XP rather than IE. I dunno.

The site is looking great. I think the usability is improved greatly and it should be reflected big-time in the traffic logs soon. I noticed Indymedia.IE is on the up on Alexa.com (yeah, I know the usual caveats) - and the Freedom Institute Swiftian Hoax has been exposed as users desert the effete tossposts in comparison to Indymedia.ie which is going the other way ...

Oscailt is an independent media centre content management system developed by the Indymedia Ireland Tech Group, and written using PHP and MySql. The word "Oscailt" is an Irish word meaning "open" and is pronounced kind of like us-kilt or us-cult or us-culch depending upon your accent.

Oscailt 3.0 has been in development for 22 months - the last six months of which were mainly concerned with testing. We advise all users of Oscailt to prepare to upgrade to this version as it fixes a number of security problems in the existing code and adds many new features.

Although the new features are far too many to mention, we believe that this release represents a step forward for IMC codebases in a number of areas.

3. A fully configurable role based access control model which supports user accounts with fine-grained control over permissions.

4. A user preference system which allows users to exercise considerable control over how they view the site.

5. An infinitely flexible management system for building new page layouts - oscailt should be able to implement any conceivable page layout without modifying any HTML or code.

6. A plethora of new syndication related features. Oscailt contains built in feeds of every variety of rss and atom. Each story has an associated feed of comments in all syndication formats. Podcasts from the site include all linked multimedia files. Oscailt also supports easy creation of an infinite number of blog-rolls and imported feeds plus a unique 'import feed story' feature, which allows users to import feed items into their local IMC from any imported feeds with a click of their mouse. An example is at: http://www.indymedia.ie/indymedia_highlights (not yet live on the Irish site btw).

7. A fully intergrated page translation system allowing you to translate all of your pages through the site interface and supporting true transparent multilingual sites.

Documentation

All of Oscailt's documentation is held on our wiki at: http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/Oscailt . Here you can find details on Oscailt's main features, how to install it, and lots more. As with all wikis it's a continuous work in progress so feel free to make or suggest additions and changes.

Download

Oscailt is freely available to use and download under the terms of the GPL.

Oscailt is a continually evolving codebase and all contributions are welcome. CVS access to the codebase is available at sourceforge.

All discussion concerning Oscailt takes place on the Oscailt Mailing List. Please subscribe if you wish to play a part in Oscailt's future development.

Bear in mind when submitting code that the primary focus of Oscailt is to serve the needs of Indymedia Ireland and this will be the primary factor in deciding whether to integrate submitted code. That said, the needs of Indymedia Ireland probably overlap a great deal with the needs of other independent media centres, so the code should be generally useful. And even then, as the code is open source you are free to create and maintain your own derivative branch if you so wish.

oscailt the software of 666 and posh nch green without the "close your effin html prompt" has caused the Google hive mind to downgrade and disregard my contributions to autonomedia, al muajaha, and for some effin reason upped my one comment ever ever on cymru. Oh well two years ago an internal mail on the barcelona indymedia list on the closure of the basque language newspaper egunkarria was hit number one. I suppose I becoming acceptable thanks to Oscailt 3.
sure they're naming kids and schools after me.

let this be a warning to ye all! use a fake name so your employers don't associate you with the radical muppets! hee hee hee just like that sardonic sarcastic editor dude hee hee hee